Peter George was Mac president for 15 years
The university’s longest-serving leader has died at age 75 after being in ill health for months
Peter George said goodbye on the cusp of spring seven years ago.
It was essentially a retirement speech for McMaster University’s longest-serving president, but clearly to George it was much more.
Billed “The Last Lecture,” he offered a 3,000-word-plus summa of his life view, a farewell in which he laughed, shed tears, and even sang a couple of lines.
“Give love and it will come back to you,” he said in Convocation Hall. “In my experience, it is returned a thousand times over.”
To George, leading the university for 15 years had not just been an occupation, it was elemental to him, a kind of
lifeblood, and leaving represented a death of sorts.
The real thing arrived Thursday morning for Peter James George, who never stopped professing his devotion to Hamilton, and who colleagues said bled McMaster maroon and grey.
He died four months shy of his 76th birthday.
George had been seriously ill for months, and many in the McMaster community and those close to his family knew he did not have much time left.
University officials held a special convocation ceremony March 31 so George could be awarded an honorary doctor of laws degree, 52 years after he first taught at the school.
“We are thinking of Peter’s family and his many friends, here on campus and around the world,” said McMaster president Patrick Deane on the school’s website.
Mayor Fred Eisenberger issued a statement Thursday evening, saying, “Peter was not only a champion of McMaster, he was a dedicated community builder committed to improving the City of Hamilton.”
The mayor also expressed his condolences on behalf of the city and said that, “Our heartfelt sympathy goes out to his family, friends and the entire McMaster community.”
There seemed destiny to the path that led George through the stone arches of McMaster. He enjoyed telling the story of how as a boy, attending a tiny schoolhouse, his teacher let him bring his dog to class, a collie named — wait for it — “Mac.”
He thought of that childhood as a magical time, growing up in the 1940s among the sand dunes on Hanlan’s Point in the Toronto islands, where his grandfather had been a lighthouse keeper.
In 1965, at 23, with his master’s degree in economics from the University of Toronto, he took a job teaching at McMaster. He had already married, Gwendolyn Scharf, a nursing student, whom he proposed to over beers on their first date. They had a son, Michael, and later had one more child, Jane, in Hamilton.
“Our lives looked pretty set, you might say even predictable,” George said in that last lecture in 2010. “But life is what happens when you’re making other plans.”
When the kids were young, he moved the family to East Africa for a year where he worked as an economist with the Tanzania Tourist Bureau, an experience he considered transformative to his outlook on education and life:
“I learned that I had been granted a privilege by an accident of birth and that privilege bears with it responsibility.”
In 1995, at 53, after three decades as an educator and administrator at McMaster, he was named president, the school’s sixth since the end of the Second World War.
Much was made of the new president’s common touch. He was, The Hamilton Spectator noted, the first Mac president to drive to work rather than be chauffeured — and in a minivan to boot.
Those were days when the title of university president still carried much old-school gravitas. George was the last to live in the President’s Residence on campus. And, the Spec noted, he urged his office cleaning staff to call him “Peter,” and disliked the traditional “Dr.” honorific used back then for all academics with PhDs.
Three months after his appointment, his wife Gwen was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer on the tissue lining the abdomen. “The First Lady of McMaster,” as a headline called her, died on March 17, 1997, but not before she helped create the Wellwood Cancer Resource Centre even as she fought the disease.
The following year, George married Allison Barrett, a minister at the First Unitarian Church on Dundurn Street — once again picking the first date to propose. They eventually adopted two daughters from China and settled in Ancaster.
George was returned by the McMaster board of directors for an unprecedented three five-year terms, and he lovingly continued in the post.
The university grew dramatically during those years, its student population more than doubled in the 2000s and buildings sprouted, including a new football stadium, athletic and student centres, an engineering building, research park and medical research facility.
He was named to the Order of Canada and the Order of Ontario. In a 1999 Spectator profile, a headline dubbed him a “superhero president.”
At one time the highest-paid university president in Ontario, his reputation took a hit in some quarters when the Spec reported details of his expense account and that he had concealed retirement payouts, which he ultimately admitted had been a “foolish” mistake.
(Such is the way of the modern digital world that in his Wikipedia write-up, half of George’s personal and professional biography is devoted to the “contract controversy.”)
He took a moment during his farewell lecture at McMaster to reference mistakes along the way, while at the same time dancing on top of them, channeling Frank Sinatra.
“Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention,” he sang at the podium, quoting the unrepentant anthem, “My Way.”
The speech was remarkable for how personal it was; he mentioned his two first-date wedding proposals, and choked back tears remembering how he had his “dream job” as president but as a “grieving widower with no one to share it with any more.”
Colleagues said he was a sensitive and intense man, and that he struggled to come to grips with no longer leading the school.
“He has, to some degree, become the institution,” Don Pether, chair of Mac’s board of governors, said at the time. “In his own mind, I’m not sure where he separates it.”
His passion for Hamilton also deepened over the decades, and he vowed that he would live here until the day he died. He once opined on a CBC Radio panel that the vista from the Mountain Brow is the most beautiful urban view in Ontario.
In the final paragraphs of his last lecture he exhorted students to love, seize the day, and pick a life partner, “or the good ones will be gone.”
And: “The only thing that really matters is what your wife and kids think of you.”
He traced his life from the days with his dog under his desk, to Africa, and McMaster’s august halls, and the “women and men I have been surrounded by in life and in love. I am one lucky man.”